“Louise!”
All that was said as the two girls clasped each other and watched the dim lanthorns far at sea. “Ah!”
Then a loud groan.
“I knowed it couldn’t be long.”
Then another deep murmur, whose strange intensity had made it dominate the shrieks, roars, and thunder of the storm.
The light, which had been slowly waving up and down in the rigging of the brig, had disappeared, and it told to all the sad tale—that the mast had gone, and with it those who had been clinging in the top.
But the two dim lanthorns in the lifeboat went on and on, the thunder of the surf on the wreck guiding them. As the crew toiled away, the landsmen sufficiently accustomed to the use of the oar could pretty well hold their own, till, in utter despair and hopelessness, after hovering hours about the place where the wreck should have been, the lifeboat’s head was laid for the harbour-lights; and after a fierce battle to avoid being driven beyond, the gallant little crew reached the shelter given by the long low point, but several had almost to be lifted to the wharf.
A few jagged and torn timbers, and a couple of bodies cast up among the rocks, a couple of miles to the east, were all the traces of Van Heldre’s handsome brig, which had gone to pieces in the darkness before the lifeboat, on its second journey, was half way there.